by William Boyd
Dido Clay CBE, 1966.
I teased her once, asking her if she had an affair with one member of every orchestra she played with.
‘Not every orchestra,’ she said, entirely seriously. ‘No, I’m very picky.’
She once said, ‘Have you noticed, Herbert von Karajan and Lenny Bernstein have exactly the same hair – same floppy front, same distinguished grey, same style – do you think it’s a conductor thing?’
‘Have you slept with either of them? Or both?’ I asked.
‘Well, I had a bit of a moment with one of them, I confess – but I won’t tell you which.’
Even though she obviously loved coming to Barrandale, she always complained about the cottage and its minor privations. She also began to dig away at me.
‘What’re you going to do now the girls have gone? You can’t take photographs of Scottish weddings for the rest of your life.’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
It happened again. I tried to pick up a jam jar this morning with my left hand to put it back in the refrigerator but I couldn’t. My hand just wouldn’t grip. I sat down, had a minute’s rest, and tried again. It worked – but just as I was going to put it on the shelf my grip loosened and the jar fell to the floor and smashed.
This is as bad as it’s ever been, my particular, worrying problem. My brain told my hand to grip but it refused. Jock Edie – whom I’d told about this problem, and who told me what he suspected was wrong – said that one day I’d have to go and see a neurologist. Perhaps the time has come.
I had lunch with Hugo Torrance at the hotel – during which my hold on the cutlery seemed secure. We were at our usual corner table tucked in beside the fireplace – where, as it happened, the first fire of the autumn was burning nicely, so Hugo informed me. As if to justify its being lit, it was raining quite heavily outside. We ate rare roast beef and drank red wine. I was feeling ideally mellow but suspicious.
‘All this is heading somewhere,’ I said. ‘I can tell by that look in your eye.’
‘It can head anywhere you like.’
‘Come on, spit it out.’
‘I’ve sold the hotel.’
This was indeed a surprise. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Are you pleased?’
‘Yes. And – more news – I’ve bought that ruined cottage round the headland from you. We’re going to be neighbours.’
*
After Dido left to go back to London, Hughie Anstruther called and reminded me that I was covering the Northern Meeting in Inverness. It would be an overnight stay and he wondered if I’d need an assistant.
‘The world and his wife seem to be going this year,’ he said. ‘Get your best frock out, sweetheart.’
I was not enthused. This would be my third Northern Meeting. I could just about handle the ball but the prospect of photographing the bagpipe-competition winners filled me with prescient fatigue. Dido was right – I had to make a change, do something entirely different. But what? All I knew was photography.
I went out for a walk, ostensibly to think, and headed unerringly for the bar at the Glenlarig Hotel. I ordered a whisky and water and asked if Mr Torrance was in and was informed that he was upstairs in his flat. I thought he might be exactly the man to ponder my dilemma with and headed off to find him. As I made my way towards his private rear stairway I passed the residents’ lounge where the door was open wide and a mute television set was silently broadcasting the evening news to a ring of empty armchairs. A flowering fire and dust-filled explosion filled the screen – oddly beautiful in its expanding terrible energy, like a giant grey chrysanthemum or monochrome dahlia – that caught my attention and I stepped inside for a second.
An unsteady hand-held camera was focussed on a bespectacled woman in a dirty, sweaty uniform crouched in a ditch talking into a microphone. She was wearing a tin helmet with the word ‘PRESS’ written on the front in white letters. In the background two ragged columns of smoke rose over jungle hills. Despite her grimy face and the unfamiliar spectacles I realised I knew who this woman was and stooped forward to turn up the volume just as she was signing off.
‘This is Lily Perette, Dang Tra province, with the US Marine Corps.’
What was it that made me decide I had to go to Vietnam? Initially, it was seeing Lily Perette on the television screen and remembering the last war we’d been involved in together. Suddenly I had this feeling that I wanted urgently to be there with her, to ask her questions: what was it like, was it dangerous, how had she come to be in Vietnam of all places? And then I realised – more analysis kicking in – that the emotion I was actually experiencing was envy. I envied Lily Perette at that moment and I felt that unbidden surge of excitement run through me. Perhaps I could go to this war, just like her. I had the same experience, the same qualifications, the same talent . . . I didn’t go up to see Hugo but returned to the bar for another pensive drink.
I sat and considered my options. Could I rejoin GPW? No. That road was closed. Was there another way? I couldn’t just buy a plane ticket and fly out to the country like a tourist. Or could I . . . ? And then the sensible portion of my mind recalled that I had a secure and steady job, albeit moderately paid, and I should just head on up north to Inverness and the bagpipe competitions and forget all this impulsiveness, this foolishness.
Yet the more the realistic, sensible, solutions lined up and presented themselves the more the idea of somehow trying to go to Vietnam began to consume me. I wanted my old job back – I wanted to be a proper photographer again. The thought of Vietnam and its distant war seemed like the perfect antidote to more Scottish weddings and eightsome reels.
I think now – now that time has passed – that what I really wanted, fundamentally, was to confront warfare again. Not so much to test myself – I had been tested – but to see how the ‘me’ that existed then would function in a war zone, would experience war differently. War had shaped, directed and distorted my life in so many ways – through my father, Xan, Sholto – that I think that the zeal I was feeling was an unconscious response to this deeper need. After Sholto and my life with him, I wanted to experience something of what he had gone through but with my new knowledge – about him, about me – informing everything. I couldn’t rewind time and be wise after the event but I could go forward and seek some answers out for myself. The newer, older, wiser Amory Clay could live through what the former, younger, more innocent Amory hadn’t been able to evaluate fully. My education as a person, so I reasoned, would never be complete if I didn’t do this, if I didn’t see for myself – and then see myself, plain. I needed to learn how I would react and respond, what it would tell me about my life and my being.
Or so I internally argued as the evening wore on in the bar of the hotel. But I was a mother, also, I made the point, with two much-loved, precious daughters. Were my arguments specious or genuine? Was I being true to myself or selfish? Well, I would never know until I actually travelled out there and confronted my demons face to face.
It was as I wandered homeward in the dark that the answer came to me: I realised I knew exactly whom I could call – not Cleveland Finzi, but another former lover who might well be in a position to help me out. More to the point, he owed me a big favour, did Lockwood Mower, from way back.
I travelled down to London and arranged to meet Lockwood – much to his delighted surprise – in his offices at the Daily Sketch where he was now the senior picture editor. Lockwood was stouter, greyer and his moustache was wider though startlingly dark, like his eyebrows. The effect was strange, as if he were wearing a rather bad and conspicuous disguise. Once the pleasantries were over, I told him why I needed his help in what I wanted to do. He was aghast.
‘Vietnam? Are you out of your mind? You can’t go out there, Amory, you’re too—’ he didn’t finish as he could see my expression change.
‘You owe me this favour, Lockwood. Look at you – picture editor, big office, national newspaper.’ I leant forward. ‘Just ad
d me quietly to your team.’
‘We don’t have a team. You can’t go out there on our ticket. Mr French would have a fit.’
‘Who’s Mr French?’
‘The editor.’
‘Then where do you get your Vietnam stuff from? You do know there’s a war on out there.’
‘Very funny, Amory. We buy it in from agencies.’
‘What agencies?’
He thought for a second.
‘We get most pictures from the Yanks, of course. A lot from this company, Sentinel Press Services. Very reasonable.’
‘American. Even better. I worked for an American magazine for years. Tell this Sentinel I worked for Global-Photo-Watch, ran their London and Paris offices in the war.’
He rubbed his chin.
‘No harm in trying, I suppose.’
‘I really want this to happen, Lockwood. Think about it – if I’m out there I can make sure you get all the good stuff.’
He agreed, it made sense. I lit a cigarette, sensing him looking at me in his old intense way, almost as if we were working together back in Greville’s studio.
‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you, Amory? It’s not some kind of whim, some mad idea?’
‘Deadly serious.’
‘All right. I’ll put a call in to the Sentinel people. See what I can do.’
I stayed on in London while I waited for news from Lockwood. I took Blythe and Annie out for dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant on the Cromwell Road called the Nam Quoc Palace as a rather too obvious pretext for letting them know my plans. When I told them that I wanted to pick up my old career again and go out to Vietnam to be a photojournalist, Annie appeared as excited by the prospect as I was – but Blythe seemed almost shocked.
‘It’s bloody dangerous, Ma,’ she said, frowning darkly at me. ‘What’re you thinking of?’
‘I’ve done it before,’ I said. ‘It was my job. I know what I’m doing – and I won’t be taking any risks, I can assure you.’
But Blythe kept on at me.
‘If you’ve done it once I don’t see why you need to do it again.’
‘I have to prove something to myself.’
‘What? Prove that you’re stupid?’
I let that go because I didn’t want to sour the mood of the evening any further. When Annie left to catch her train to Brighton Blythe stayed on and we ordered another coffee and some kind of sweet rice dumpling. Her mood seemed to calm and she took my hand and twiddled my wedding ring.
‘It’s because of Papa, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘That’s why you feel you need to go.’
‘Partly, yes,’ I said, trying to hide my surprise at her insight. ‘And it’s partly to do with me. And my life.’
She turned my ring round on my finger, then sighed and let my hand go. She busied herself meticulously rolling a thin cigarette. I lit up to keep her company and the two of us puffed away in silence for a few moments.
‘It’s so far away,’ she said, finally. ‘I think that’s what’s bothering me. You’re going to be on the other side of the world.’
‘I won’t be there forever.’
‘For how long, then?’ she asked, almost aggressively.
‘I’m not sure, yet. I have to get out there first.’
‘I may never see you again,’ she said, her eyes suddenly large with tears.
‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ I said, perhaps more testily than I meant. ‘You know, I have a life to lead as well as you two. I can’t just sit and rot on Barrandale.’
‘Of course,’ she said, letting her body sag in the chair, closing her eyes and smiling to herself. ‘I just like the idea of you being close at hand.’
We hugged goodbye on the pavement and I promised I would call her as often as possible. She seemed more reconciled to the idea of my going away, now we were outside the restaurant, and I wondered if the pointed Vietnam theme had been a bad idea. Too late, anyway. I watched her saunter away towards her bus stop, a tall, thin and limber young woman in her shaggy coat, her long hair halfway down her back, and felt the old love-pang corkscrew through me. My pretty, stubborn, clever, complicated daughter.
When I returned to the hotel there was a message to call Lockwood at the Sketch.
‘Hello, Lockwood, it’s me.’
‘You’re on. Bon voyage.’
BOOK SEVEN: 1966–1968
1. THE VIETNAM SCRAPBOOK
Lockwood was not entirely accurate: I wasn’t wholly ‘on’ at all. Sentinel Press Services had grudgingly agreed to take me on as a stringer but only for a trial month for which I would be paid $200. I would also have to pay for my own transportation out to Vietnam and my accommodation once I arrived in Saigon. And no expenses. I could only agree. Sentinel did have a small permanent bureau in Saigon, Lockwood said, with a staff of three, including a photographer. ‘They did take a bit of persuading, Amory,’ he said, knowingly, and I wondered if Lockwood or the Daily Sketch were underwriting my meagre paycheck. One photographer is never enough, I said, surely. I think Lockwood was trying to make me understand the brutal realities of the situation but I was already excited. I didn’t care – I was going to my war. I negotiated one further condition in the light of these restrictions – and the fact that I was hardly being paid at all. I don’t know why I insisted but it was one of the smartest moves I ever made in my life, as it turned out. I told him I would license my photos to Sentinel for first-use but I would retain the copyright. That shouldn’t be a problem, he said. Just make sure we get all your best stuff, here. I think by then Lockwood was assuming I’d go out there, have my short adventure, then suffer and be miserable, flush the idea out of my system and come home, having proved myself. I think he calculated I’d last a couple of weeks and $200 was a small price to pay for getting me off his back. How wrong he was.
When I arrived in Saigon I started keeping an intermittent journal, filling it with my impressions and thoughts and sticking in some of the photographs I took. I think I already had the idea that I might make a book out of this experience.
Saigon, Vietnam, 1967. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.
I was sitting in the Saigon press centre yesterday listening to the new IO give us the latest KIA and MIA1 facts, thinking that he looked a bit like Xan, and simultaneously remarking on the dozens and dozens of empty seats – someone had told me there were 700 journalists in Vietnam; where the hell was everybody? Then Mary Poundstone slipped into the plastic chair beside me. Her face was taut, her lips thinned.
‘They won’t renew my visa,’ she said. ‘Bastards. Let’s go and get a drink.’
So we went to the rooftop bar at the Caravelle Hotel2 and ordered two gins and tonic with lots of ice and found a table some distance from everyone else. Mary and I had met up again shortly after I had arrived in February (1967) having last seen each other in the Vosges mountains in 1944. I knew what she’d been up to in the interim. She had become even more of a legend since then – books of reportage, two collections of short stories, a cluster of prizes, lionisation by a new generation of writers – but in Saigon the two of us began to spend a lot of time together, seek each other out at the press briefings, so much so that we became known to the press corps as the ‘Old Gals’. I was fifty-nine, Mary was sixty-four – by some way the oldest journalists in Vietnam.
Right from the outset she started giving me advice over what to wear: khaki, white or beige masculine clothing – pants and shirts – with one feminine touch. Wear combat fatigues when you go out with the troops but don’t look like a soldier or a fashionable woman when you’re in town or at the bases. Add a bright scarf, a brooch, bangles, she advised. I decided to go the earring route and chose a pair of small gold hoops, about an inch in diameter, that I wore all the time – my trademark – even with a tin helmet. My ‘look’ was khaki chinos and a white T-shirt under an untucked, multi-pocketed cotton drill shirt, mostly tan, sometimes denim, sometimes linen, with epaulettes. Truong,1 my driver, found me a tailor on Cong Thanh Street wh
o would run me up half a dozen of these pseudo-military shirts for a pack of 200 Salem cigarettes.
Truong, my driver. Without whom . . .
The SPS bureau is in a house on a narrow side street called An Qui Alley, about a block away from Time’s offices. The bureau chief is a grumpy, officious man called Lane Burrell. The two assigned journalists, the ‘staffers’, are Ron Paxton and a young woman with the unlikely name of Renata Alabama, the photographer. Lane Burrell told me that I was only ‘attached’ to SPS and that if ever asked I should say I was working for the London Daily Sketch. He’d do what he could to expedite my accreditation, however. He said, ‘What did you ever do to Lockwood Mower? Boy does he love you.’ I’m almost certain Lockwood is paying my way out here. Lane seems happy enough with the arrangement but I don’t think Ron and Renata are particularly pleased at my arrival and I suspect I won’t ever win them over.2
Burrell, Paxton and Alabama live in a roomy three-bedroom apartment above the bureau offices. As part of SPS’s conditions I have to find my own place to live. I checked out an apartment above a French restaurant on Nguyen Van Thu Street, on the bad side of the Saigon River. The restaurant is called Le Mistral de Provence and that’s what made me rent the two-room apartment – memories of Charbonneau. No hot water, no air conditioning, a bed, two plastic chairs and a table and a bathroom with a shower that dripped rather than ran. It cost $50 a month.
When I arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport and stepped off the Pan Am flight from Hong Kong it was the heat that almost drove me back on the plane. I’d never experienced heat like that, furnace hot and wet at the same time. Like being dry in a warm sea. Like being wet in a dry desert. I could never quite describe it properly. Also I’d never seen so many aircraft in one place, hundreds, it appeared, civilian and military, single-seaters, four-engine Boeing jetliners – Pan Am, Cathay Pacific, PAL, Flying Tigers – Phantoms, DC-3s, and on and on – landing, taking off, parked seemingly haphazardly in ragged rows, as if casually abandoned by their pilots who’d walked away looking for a bar.